I’ve been building products for as long as I can remember—consumer and enterprise. Operator. Brand builder. Husband. Dad. This is the story so far.
The Beginning
The Lemonade Stand
I was seven. My parents couldn't afford the GameBoy, so they told me I'd need to make the money myself.
I did what every seven-year-old does: I started a lemonade stand. Day one, I made almost nothing.
So I pivoted. Soda and candy instead of lemonade, and a better location. Business took off, so I hired kids from the neighborhood to run the stand for a dollar an hour while my mom shuttled me back and forth to the grocery store to restock.
One day after the pivot, I had the money. That Christmas, the GameBoy was worth more than I had paid for it. So I sold it on eBay.
I kept buying and selling through elementary and middle school. I've been building, pivoting, and flipping ever since.
The sign says it all: post-pivot, soda at four times the price of lemonade.
First Internet Businesses
In middle school I taught myself Photoshop and built my first website: MakeMyPicturePerfect.com. I still have no idea how customers found me, but the orders came. The one I remember best was a wedding album a customer wanted edited so everything was black and white except the flowers.
We hit 250,000 users in the first month.
This was before the cloud. My servers kept crashing under the growth.
As the site grew, I came home from school one day and found a letter in the mailbox.
My aunt is a trademark attorney. She wrote back and told them to kick rocks. They didn't budge.
RE: RE: CEASE AND DESIST
Be advised: we are backed by the Starz Media Company. Our general counsel spent a decade at Microsoft. We aren't going anywhere.
That didn't scare me. It did scare my dad, once they figured out I was under 18 and started addressing the letters to him.
I tried to sell them the site. I tried to get a job out of it. Neither worked, so I shut it down and moved on. I was sixteen.
The Apple Years
Sophomore year, my C++ teacher Donn taught me how computing actually works at the byte level. His claim to fame: frustrated by carrying floppy disks home from the office, he wrote scripts to encode binaries, email them to himself, and decode them at home, some of the earliest work behind the email attachment. I'd taught myself websites. He taught me fundamentals I've carried ever since.
Around the same time I became obsessed with Steve Jobs and his ability to convey product vision like no one else.
"An iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator. An iPod, a phone... are you getting it?"
I was so enamored that I didn't just buy every phone at launch. I started a second successful site: iTalkiPhone, Apple news and forums.
At the peak, I convinced my parents to let me camp out for three days for the iPhone 4 at the 5th Avenue Apple Store in New York. I recruited friends and we all stood in line in bright green iTalkiPhone shirts. Celebrities walked past us all weekend.
On launch day, I was one of the first in the world to get an iPhone 4.
The longer version involves gangsters, fights, reporters, and getting drugged by a stranger in line. Too much for the internet. Excellent over beers.
The College Decision
Junior year, I started thinking about what came next. Social, local, mobile was just catching on, and I was convinced I was going to move to the Bay Area and build the next Facebook.
Then Peter Thiel announced the inaugural Thiel Fellowship: drop out, get funded, build. I applied immediately and advanced quickly, building a site to connect the applicants while I waited. My mom was less enthusiastic about the dropping-out part.
So we made a deal. I'd also ask Julian Robertson for advice. Julian was a family friend. He'd funded my parents' ministry when we lived in New York, where I was born. He was also a hedge fund legend who had turned $8 million into $8 billion. He agreed to meet, and hosted us at the Tiger Management offices and at his apartment on Central Park South.
Looking back, I'm both grateful and astonished that he agreed to hear a full-of-himself 17-year-old pitch a social network. He even brought in Lee Fixel to listen.
"Taylor, this sounds great, but we don't do early stage. We find proven models like Amazon and invest large checks in companies building the Amazon of India."
Lee Fixel, politely passing
I asked Julian whether I should take the fellowship or go to college. He pointed out that Peter went to Stanford and had clearly taken advantage of every educational opportunity he'd been given, then gave me his answer: do both. Go to college, and start a company there.
The fellowship didn't come through. Julian's advice did. I went to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, his alma mater, and arrived ready to make the company I'd begun building in 2011 my education.
Bevii / Friendli · Founder
I started at UNC in August 2012 and refused to do what first-years do. I skipped the gen eds and signed up for advanced computer science, an entrepreneurship course with Jim Kitchen, who became a mentor and eventually an investor, and a graduate program called Launching the Venture. Freshman year is also when I met the woman I'd marry. More on that shortly.
The company was Bevii. The problem was simple, and it has only gotten worse since: the technology that promised to make us more social was making us less social. Bevii was a location-based social network that used BLE, WiFi, and GPS to automatically connect you with the people you actually spent time with offline, so you could scroll less and live more.
I closed a $300,000 seed round in 2013. Oh, how times have changed. Six months later, I launched. Then I made a bad decision. One I had been explicitly told not to make: I spoofed the university alert system.
Web traffic went ballistic. So did my detractors.
I called an emergency board meeting and we decided to get ahead of it. I called the chief of police myself, gave him all of my information, and explained that the email wasn't meant to go out: I'd set a timestamp on my open-source mail server and forgotten to disable it.
Downloads were through the roof. It looked like it had worked. Then the real problem surfaced: the app itself didn't work. What ran perfectly in test scenarios fell apart at scale with thousands of users. iPhones wouldn't let us continuously scan for other devices over BLE, and iOS killed our background processes to free up memory.
I was crushed.
I kept it alive as long as the funding allowed. I got sued over the name and rebranded to Friendli. I pivoted twice, once getting close to disrupting business cards at trade shows, and once building an ML algorithm that used nearly every sensor on the phone to answer a hard question: who did I just talk to, for how long, and how do we know it wasn't just someone walking past? It worked beautifully in the foreground. It died in the background, every time.
In the first year we reached over two million people through in-person events, guerrilla marketing, press, and word of mouth. We had technical breakthroughs worthy of a research paper. None of them made the app financially viable.
By the end of senior year, I'd done all there was to do. It was time to shut it down. I had a few dollars left in the bank and had just asked for my now-wife's hand in marriage. Her dad made a very reasonable request: have a steady, revenue-producing job before the wedding.
I barely graduated. It turns out taking only the classes you want to take is frowned upon. I'd taken the best of business, computer science, design, marketing, branding, media, and entrepreneurship, which fit no major. Interdisciplinary studies declined me. The business school declined me. The School of Media and Journalism finally agreed, on one condition: pass a usage and grammar test most students fail several times, on my first and only attempt, or delay my diploma.
I passed by 5 percentage points. My final degree was Tech Entrepreneurship and Launching of New Ventures.
3 Birds · Product & Engineering
Out of school I met Layton, a local entrepreneur who'd built an automotive marketing company called 3 Birds Marketing. We understood each other immediately. He hired me as Head of Special Projects: he'd bring me ideas, I'd prototype them, tell him whether they were viable, and merge the good ones into the product roadmap. Looking back, I was using the 2016 version of vibe coding to ship apps in days.
Layton gave me an absurd amount of responsibility for someone a year out of college and, honestly, paid me more than I probably deserved. I got good fast. Within months I was running the product org. When our CTO left, I took that on too. By the end I was VP of Product and Engineering, directing a 16-person org of engineers, data analysts, PMs, and designers.
The results were real: we were able to launch the most advanced email marketing tool on the market, which grew our revenue 50 percent year over year while I was there. This is where I learned to translate top-level vision into products customers actually pay for.
And in early October 2016, three months into that steady, revenue-producing job, I kept my end of the deal and married my wife, Lauren.
Tesla · Customer to Operator
Around this time I bought my first Tesla, a 2017 Deep Blue Model X, one of the first in North Carolina. I was obsessed. Elon had hooked me with the promise of cars that would drive themselves. I evangelized it to anyone who'd listen and referred 12 people into Model S and Model X cars.
The referral program rewarded me handsomely: a Powerwall, custom wheels, an invite to the Semi and Roadster unveil, and a promise to shoot my photo into deep space. Remember that last one.
The program's awards were brilliant. Its operations weren't. And when the Model 3 launched, the economics broke completely: 55 referrals earned you a next-generation Roadster at a price point that no longer made sense. The whole referral team was gone by 2019.
Then a friend from high school who worked at Tesla reached out. The program needed someone to own it, and it was the company's only growth program at the time. In October 2019 I moved to San Francisco and took the job. The customer took over the program.
Six months into the job, the world shut down.
Side Project · 03.17.2020
On March 17, 2020, as San Francisco locked down, Lauren and I assembled the first WFH Care Package. We were going stir-crazy and had an idea: companies suddenly had entire teams working from home. What if they could send employees something that made the isolation feel a little less isolating?
We grabbed things from around the apartment, assembled V0, registered WFHCarePackage.com, and put up a site. For $55, each box included coffee, snacks, a notebook and pen, a logic game book, a $10 food-delivery gift card, and a personal note. A portion of every sale went to local food banks.
Within weeks, we ranked number one on Google for variations of “work from home care package.” Every order came through organic search or word of mouth. Teams at YouTube, a large insurance company, and companies around the country found us without a dollar of paid marketing.
V1 of the supply chain was Lauren and me driving around the Bay Area buying every bag of Starbucks coffee and dollar-store Sudoku book we could find. By the end, we had a coffee partnership with Saint Frank Coffee and bulk suppliers for everything else.
We sourced, packed, and shipped thousands of boxes ourselves, often assembling them at night after work with Tiger King playing in the background. USPS picked everything up directly from our apartment.
As the world reopened, demand faded and the business naturally wound down. It had done what it was built to do.
Almost twenty years after the lemonade stand, the playbook had not changed: spot the need, build the roughest possible version, follow the demand, and keep improving.
Meanwhile, at Tesla, the work was just getting started.
Skip the Tesla highlights01 · Referral Program
We rebuilt it around the community: points for every referral, awards that were actually in stock and mostly fulfilled within 48 hours, plus tracking and notifications right in the app when friends ordered and took delivery. Support volume dropped 5X. At its peak the program influenced billions in quarterly automotive revenue, a large share of it purely incremental sales with no prior touch.
02 · Tesla for Business
0 1
In 2019 Tesla had no way for a company to manage a fleet. We built one from zero, and it now manages everything from cars and Wall Connectors to Semis for Tesla's largest enterprise customers.
03 · Shop
I also took over Shop, Tesla's e-commerce platform, and scaled it to millions of unique users and hundreds of thousands of orders a quarter.
04 · Dogecoin
Over the 2021 holidays, my team spent 72 straight hours solving legal and financial problems nobody had a playbook for, and on January 13th we made Tesla the first company in the world to sell physical products natively priced in Dogecoin.
05 · Deep Space
And the deep space promise? I inherited all the legacy awards to fulfill, including my own. We partnered with SpaceX to find the right mission and landed on KPLO. On August 4th, 2022, a laser-etched mosaic of tens of thousands of owner photos, mine among them, launched into an orbit where it will likely remain forever.
KPLO · 08.04.2022 · AN ORBIT WHERE IT WILL LIKELY REMAIN FOREVER
06 · The Drops
The Shop years were exhilarating: Tesla Tequila, GigaBier, CyberBeer, the Cyberwhistle, Short Shorts, and the infrastructure to survive massive traffic spikes from an Elon tweet. The last 420 bottles of tequila went on sale on 4/20 at 4:20pm for $420 and sold out in under a minute.
00:60 · 420 BOTTLES · $420 · 4:20 PM
07 · Tesla Electric
I also launched Tesla Electric in Texas, navigating retail electricity regulation to bring an entirely new Tesla product to market.
I launched numerous other products along the way, but the biggest thing Tesla gave me was five years inside a brand with a genuine cult following. Good brands are a dime a dozen. Brands people obsess over are extremely rare, and I got real-time feedback on every move we made, from release notes to Supercharger conversations. Those years changed how I build.
Armada · AI Infrastructure
ChatGPT landed at the end of 2022, and the feeling was unmistakable. It was the mobile shift all over again, the one I'd watched take off from a high school bedroom, except bigger.
I followed the industry closely for two years. One thing kept nagging at me: AI was advancing extremely fast, and the world would soon need much more compute to meet the demand. I asked a mentor for a list of companies positioned for that future. Armada was on it.
In 2024 I joined Armada as Head of Growth and employee 66. Armada builds full-stack, modular AI infrastructure that lets anyone deploy and run AI workloads anywhere in the world, bringing compute to the source of the data and running models right alongside it.
Since then, the company has grown to more than 500 people, raised hundreds of millions of dollars, and gone from a $250 million valuation to $2 billion.
My job was to make a deeply technical product easier for the market to understand, assemble an exceptional team, and build a generational brand around it.
The numbers moved with it. Sustained website traffic grew 5X. Awareness increased by roughly an order of magnitude across branded search and owned and earned impressions.
Today, Armada works with some of the biggest companies in the world. We build megawatt-scale AI factories that can put hundreds of megawatts of compute wherever the energy is. The mission is bridging the digital divide, and we're just getting started.
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In late January 2026, my son Clark was born.
I've believed for a long time that technology should be used for the benefit of humanity. That belief has a face now, and I want to leave the world better than I found it for him. I can't think of a better time in history to be a builder.
I'm still building. The stakes just feel more personal now.
If any of this resonates, say hi. I'm always up for coffee and meeting interesting people.
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